Category: News

It was a year ago when Boise Weekly sat down with teams of staff members from rural Idaho libraries who had convened in Boise to learn how to master 3-D printing and share that knowledge with residents in every corner of the Gem State. The librarians were even granted their own 3-D printers that had been built or repurposed with, get this, parts printed by previous incarnations of 3-D printers.

And it turns out that the Treasure Valley has had a robust 3-D printing community

“Absolutely; there are a lot of us building 3-D printers in Boise,” said Davis Ultis, general manager of Boise Reuseum, who hosts something called Open Lab Idaho at the Boise facility billed as a “community hackerspace and makerspace … for hackers, computer geeks, engineers, circuit benders, crafters, tinkerers, programmers and artists.”

Enter Hewlett-Packard, which obviously smells a major business opportunity. HP has unveiled it first commercial 3-D printer, dubbed “Multi Jet Fusion,” for about $10,000. HP revealed its device at a New York trade show. But don’t expect one under the Christmas tree. HP says its Multi Jet Fusion printer will hit store shelves in 2016. By the way, it’s as big as an office copy machine.

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Fuji Xerox Co Ltd tested a printer that not only prints documents on paper but autonomously moves around a room like the Roomba robot cleaner for delivering it.

Fuji Xerox used a prototype of the robot in a building located in Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo, in July and August 2014 in cooperation with Tokyu Land Corp for operation tests. Visitors to the lounge of the building used it for free.

The printing of documents is carried out via an Internet browser. Each desk in the lounge has a smart card on which a URL for printing is written. When the URL is accessed with a browser and a file is dragged and dropped in the browser window, an instruction to print out the file (print job) is sent to the robot.

When the robot receives a print job, it automatically begins to move toward the desk being used by the person who sent the order. Because it knows where in the lounge it is running, it stops near the desk.

The print job starts only after the user holds the card up to the robot. Therefore, the printed paper does not come out when the robot is moving in the lounge. As a result, business papers, etc will not be seen by others even in a public space like a lounge.

The robot houses a color laser printer of Fuji Xerox. It can handle sheets of up to A4 size. And it is the company’s smallest printer. On the top of the robot, a tablet computer is mounted. When the user presses the “start moving” button displayed on it after the printing job is done, it automatically goes back to the “home position” in a corner of the lounge.

Because the battery of the robot lasts for a day, it does not need to be charged in the home position.

For the autonomous movement function, the robot uses the “Lidar” sensors, which use laser to measure the three dimensional shapes of surrounding objects. While conventional radar devices use radio waves, the Lidar uses light (laser) instead so that more detailed information can be obtained in the range of several tens of meters.

The robot can automatically make a three-dimensional map of the lounge. If it is manually moved around a room at the time of introduction, a map for autonomous operation is made in the robot. It is not necessary to set up “markers” to be detected by sensors. When the robot detects an object that does not exist in the map, it sees the object as a human and selects a route so that it can avoid the person.

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In one of the more entertaining printer surveys we’ve seen recently, HP polled 1051 office workers in 2013 to find out ‘how Australians use their printers’. The research, conducted online by Lonergan Research, came out with all sorts of interesting numbers about waiting times and extra wages, but it also found that up to 25 per cent of males are most likely to shout verbal abuse at office printers, while 23 per cent of females are mostly likely to ‘stroke the printer with words of encouragement to make it print faster’.

HP supplied the information on the same day that it released its new range of enterprise inkjet printers, which it claims are a real alternative to laser printers, capable of offering up to twice the print speed of comparable-class lasers.

HP’s findings claim that an employee spends five minutes waiting for a document to print every day, and waits at the printer for up to 23 hours per year. Queenslanders spent the most time at the printer than workers in any other state.

Respondents said that printers are often the most overlooked equipment when it comes to office upgrades, with 73 per cent of workers claiming their computer was upgraded more frequently, and 47 per cent claiming their printer was over three years old. Of all the states, printers are upgraded the least in NSW and ACT.

Workers in NSW were mostly likely to be affected by office rage caused by printers, with up to 60 per cent of employees admitting to using violence against a printer (probably in a bid to get it upgraded). Queenslanders were the most patient.

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Remember back in January when HP announced it would bring a tabletop 3-D printer to market, at a place and time to be named later? That place and time just became a quite a bit less ambiguous. Today Stratasys, the company that is manufacturing the device for HP, announced that it has shipped the first units of the HP-branded Designjet 3D fabrication machines, which will be available in May — but only in Europe.

The Designjet 3D is based on Stratasys’s Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology, which turns three-dimensional CAD drawings into tangible prototypes by extruding partially molten ABS plastic in extremely fine layers one atop the other, forming the entire 3-D model in a single piece from the ground up. Designjet 3D will print in ivory-colored plastic only while Designjet Color 3D will print single-color parts in up to eight different colors (we’re not sure why you can’t just put a different hue of ABS plastic in the Designjet 3D).

Aimed at businesses large and small as well as educational institutions and individual inventors, the idea is to offer a point of entry into 3-D printing for those who want to prototype in-house directly from their computers. That kind of convenience can save a lot of time and money on product development, but it also comes with a sizeable up-front cost.

In our earlier coverage to speculated that the price of HP’s printer would come in under $15,000 — the price of a similar printer recently released by Stratasys. But HP today announced that the Designjet 3D would retail starting at less than €13,000, or just under $17,500. Which means the price of entry into the 3-D club may still sit somewhere between unfeasible and pie-in-the-sky for many garage-shop hobbyists.

But the HP printer, by all appearances, seems to have one thing going for it that many commercially scaled systems do not — ease of use. A Designjet in the corner of the office would allow architects, engineers, product developers and the like to carry an idea through from concept to prototype without leaving their desks, culminating in a plastic 3-D model that they can put in the hands of higher-ups or prospective clients. It beats the alternative method of producing up various detailed drawings that are carefully crafted into a prototype by a skilled (and expensive) machinist, a process that can be a suck on time and budgets, especially if designers don’t get it exactly right the first time.

And, lest ye forget, while $17,000 is a big chunk of cash, Designjet 3D is still among the most affordable rapid prototyping systems out there for its size and capability. There are other options – the open-source, DIY MakerBot kit costs less than $1,000 and prints in the same material – but you have to build it. As far as something off-the-shelf is concerned, you’re not likely to do a whole lot better.

What’s really going to define whether the Designjet is a big step forward for 3-D printing is the quality of the prototypes, which we’ll surely hear much more about in coming weeks as the product hits desktops in the UK, Spain, France, Italy and Germany. For those of you not lucky enough to be in those inaugural markets, worry not; rest assured Designjet will be prototyping globally soon enough.

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Security flaws in a range of HP printers create a way for hackers to lift administrator’s passwords and other potentially sensitive information from vulnerable devices, infosec experts have warned.

HP has released patches for the affected LaserJet Pro printers to defend against the vulnerability (CVE-2013-4807), which was discovered by Michał Sajdak of Securitum.pl. Sajdak discovered it was possible to extract plaintext versions of users’ passwords via hidden URLs hardcoded into the printers’ firmware. A hex representation of the admin password is stored in a plaintext URL, though it looks encrypted to a casual observer.

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Photocopying has always ranked among the more tedious of office chores – and now it seems that some of the machines may have been working against us all along.

A German computer scientist and blogger has identified a glitch in a range of Xerox photocopying and scanning machines which causes them to randomly alter numbers in documents. In a statement issued today, the US firm, which holds a Royal warrant and is over 100 years old, said it took the issue “very seriously”, adding that the problem lay with the factory default settings.

In one example, David Kriesel who is based in Bonn, found copies he had made of construction plans had altered dimensions of some of the rooms. One Xerox printer had enlarged the square meter of a room from 14.13 m² to 17.42m², while another shrunk it from 21.11 m² to 14.13 m². Mr Kriesel found the copier would often change the number 6 into the number 8, and vice versa. He said the issue arose through an “image compression” fault, linked to how the scanners shrink the file size of scans.

Mr Kriesel identified two models affected – the Xerox WorkCentre 7535 and the 7556. However, since then he said other users had reported problems in other machines. On his website, Mr Kriesel complained that Xerox had been slow to issue an explanation for the error: “I learned in the last days that a lot of people worldwide seem to have run into the same trap. I got around 200,000 hits and several mails from people experiencing the same errors without a clue where they come from. A notice to the public would have been nice.”

Xerox said: “The problem stems from a combination of compression level and resolution setting. We do not normally see a character substitution issue… However, the defect may be seen at lower quality and resolution settings.”

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Coming soon to a printer near you: more NFC. Samsung said Wednesday that two color laser printers with near-field communication would be available in the U.S. starting next week. (The printers were announced in Korea last month.) The products are the Xpress C410W color laser single-function printer, which will cost $229, and the Xpress C460FW MFP color laser multifunction printer, which will cost $399.

NFC helps printers keep pace with mobile users

NFC is still most common in cell phones and tablets. But no matter how much content moves online, everyone needs to print once in a while. NFC is supposed to make it easier for that print to happen through a simple touch, though there’s also an app involved, of course.

Brother beat Samsung to the U.S. market with an NFC-equipped inkjet multifunction printer two weeks ago, the MFC-J870DW, but Samsung’s are the first laser-based models to arrive here. The C410W is your basic, low-end color laser for a home or very small office. The C460FW MFP is based on the same engine but adds a scanner and automatic document feeder for copy, scan, and fax functions.

Basic specs and probably pricey toner

Both products have top print speeds, per Samsung, of 19 pages per minute (ppm) for plain, black text and 4 ppm for color output. Paper handling includes a 150-sheet input tray and a 50-sheet output tray—best suited for low-volume use, in other words.

Here’s your other hint that these are low-end products: the toner capacities. The printers ship with starter-size cartridges that last for just 700 pages (black) and 500 pages (each color). Replacement cartridges last 1,500 pages for black and 1,000 pages for each color. A home or small-office user is assumed to print at fairly low volumes, so it may take a while even to get through those starter cartridges. But once you do, don’t be surprised if the replacement cartridges have high costs per page. That’s how it works with the cheap lasers: They get you on the toner instead.

NFC coming to business printers next

Samsung isn’t stopping there. The company says that an NFC-equipped business printer will be coming in early 2014.

To a large degree, NFC is a technology still seeking its destiny. At the same time, printers are doing their best to stay in the tech game. Adding NFC helps them keep pace, just as they all had to jump onto cloud printing a couple of years ago. For the moment, it’s a differentiator for these printers, but the truth is that unless near-field communication pops up in more products—and more services, it’s not going to get very far.

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Samsung Electronics Co today announced a new line of ProXpress mono laser printers and multifunction printers (MFPs) for small and medium-sized business customers and home office use. These new products offer fast print speeds, high print quality and versatility, and have been specifically designed for users who require low operating costs and high performance. The new M4020ND and M3820ND printers and the M4070FR and M3870FD MFPs offer an all-in-one integrated toner system, robust eco features and duplex printing for lower operating costs and higher efficiency.

“Small to medium-sized businesses and professionals who work at home are increasingly seeking lower operating costs for maximum profitability without sacrificing on high performance,” said Mike van Lier, Business Leader for IT Solutions at Samsung Electronics South Africa. “The Printer ProXpress and the Multifunction ProXpress series are built to offer an efficient experience with fast speeds and high-quality images at a reasonable cost. In fact, our ProXpress MFPs fall into what IDC calls ‘the sweet spot of the monochrome laser MFP market’, predicting that this segment is expected to post the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10% compared with other speed segments in this market by 2017*.”

Powerful and efficient performance

With print speeds of up to 35 ppm to 42 ppm for letter size documents**, each of the new models provides fast, reliable and economically efficient performance for business users. The units enable document and image processing for increased workflow, through their Cortex A5 processors and up to 256MB of memory.

All models come with standard automatic duplex, which allows for printing on both sides of the page as well as a multi-purpose tray, which supports media of up to 220 gsm (58 lbs) in weight. Offering more printing choices for professional documents such as labels, cards and envelopes, the multi-purpose tray enhances the units’ versatility and usefulness to the users.

The Multifunction ProXpress M4070FR also includes a DADF (duplex automatic document feeder) feature, which allows users to easily copy, scan and fax double-sided documents. And with scan speeds of up to 24 ipm for single-sided documents, the MFPs can further improve office efficiency.

High quality and easy to use

For sharper text and clearer images, both series are built with Samsung’s image-processing technology, Rendering Engine for Clean Pages (ReCP). This technology improves the readability of printed documents by enhancing thin lines and sharpening the edges of negative text. Coupled with print resolutions of up to 1 200 x 1 200 dpi, the ProXpress series delivers unparalleled image quality in its class. All units come with the Samsung Easy Printer Manager, a powerful application that integrates all your print management into one easy-to-use system.

Cost control with integrated toner system and easy eco driver

For the small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) market, value is just as important as powerful performance and quality. With Samsung’s Easy Eco Driver and One Touch Eco Button, customers can effectively manage printing options. These functions help reduce paper, toner and energy consumption. The Easy Eco Driver can reduce toner use by up to 20% with the toner-saving mode. This mode allows the user to remove images, convert from bitmap to sketch, and remove bold text to save toner.

In addition, four different toner cartridges supporting different printing volumes are available, from the standard cartridge, which yields 3 000 pages and offers a low initial cost, to the ultra-high-yield toner cartridge, which yields 15 000 pages*** and offers an extremely low cost per page.

Secure and convenient

For additional security, all units feature enterprise-level security with Samsung SyncThru Admin, which offers greater control of user, document and network access. Customers can securely print with a built-in numeric keypad on all units, except for the M3320ND. By entering a PIN, a user can elect to send a confidential or personal print job right from the driver, ideal for government or healthcare customers who are printing secure documents. This option protects sensitive information and reduces the number of wasted prints if users decide they no longer need that print job.

Fully mobile

Samsung’s Mobile Print App enables users to print and scan from any mobile device with any Samsung network-shared printer and MFP without the need for a computer. The app can be easily downloaded to the user’s smartphone or tablet, and supports Android, Windows and iOS mobile platforms. With its capability to print Microsoft Office documents as well as support for Job Accounting and Secure print, businesses can improve the efficiency of their increasingly mobile workforces.

In addition, both the Printer ProXpress and the Multifunction ProXpress are Google Cloud Print Ready, allowing users to print remotely from any mobile device with their Google accounts. This is an ideal printing solution for Chromebook users, especially among the education market, where Chromebooks are growing in popularity for student and educator use.

Eco-sensitive

As part of Samsung’s commitment to the environment, all the latest models are ENERGY STAR qualified, along with having earned a Bronze rating from EPEAT, a global registry for greener electronics. Furthermore, all toner is eligible for Samsung’s S.T.A.R. Program, a free service that recycles empty Samsung cartridges into their major usable component materials, which are then reused for other products. Single and bulk returns are available.

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Kodak announced this week it has agreed to sell assets from its Document Imaging business to office equipment maker Brother Industries in a cash deal worth $210m.

Under the terms of the deal Brother has also agreed to assumed liability for deferred service revenue from the Document Imaging business, adding another $67m to the final price.

The deal means that Kodak’s once-vibrant business for scanners, image-capture software and technical services will now be combined with Brother’s office equipment business that includes fax machines and small all-in-one printers.

Kodak entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2012 and so this proposed sale will need the approval of US Bankruptcy Court, which is expected at a hearing later this month.

Once that approval is given, an auction with Brother as the “stalking horse”, or initial bidder, will be run. But others bidders could come forward at that time and conceivably offer more for the Document Imaging assets and business.

“This proposed sale is another key step in Kodak’s path to emergence – it moves us closer to realizing our strategic vision for Kodak’s future,” Kodak Chairman/CEO Antonio Perez said in a statement. “A sale to Brother, should they prevail, would represent an excellent outcome for Document Imaging’s customers, partners and employees.”

In addition to selling the Document Imaging business, Kodak had also previously indicated plans to sell its Personalised Imaging division, which includes its consumer film, photo paper, finishing and photo kiosk businesses. However, there is currently no timetable for when that sale might occur. In December, Kodak also sold a large portion of its digital-imaging patents for about $525m.

Last month Kodak finalised a previously-announced $848m finance facility with members of the Steering Committee of the Second Lien Noteholders and other holders of Kodak’s Senior Secured Notes. Under the terms of the deal Kodak has borrowed an aggregate principal amount of approximately $473m and converted $375m in Senior Secured Notes into loans.

The agreement also lowered the amount of money the company needed to get from the sale of its noncommercial-imaging business to $600m.

In an interview with PrintWeek, Kodak Corporate Communications Manager Christopher Veronda said Kodak’s Document Imaging employees, including a number based in Rochester that focus on R&D, will be joining Brother as part of the deal.

Veronda suggested the sale price for the Document Imaging assets was enough to ensure the company can continue on with its plans to exit bankruptcy this year. “The next step will be to file a plan of reorganisation (with the US Bankruptcy Court) and we plan to do that by the end of the month,” he added.

“With today’s mobile workforce, being able to print on-the-go is becoming an increasingly valuable asset,” said Sam Yoshida, vice president and general manager, Marketing, Business Imaging Solutions Group, Canon U.S.A. “The new Canon Mobile Printing App provides ease of use and places traditional print functionality at the fingertips of today’s mobile worker.”

The Canon Mobile Printing App features the following innovative tools:

OpenIn Compatibility Improves Efficiency

The Canon Mobile Printing user experience becomes seamless with the integration of OpenIn, a feature that allows users to capitalize on the functionality of the mobile app while navigating through files located elsewhere. The OpenIn feature allows users to easily navigate to Canon Mobile Printing directly from the application they are in, giving the customer more ways to access printing.

The app supports devices running iOS 5.1 – 6.0 and is available for the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, the new iPad, iPad 2, and the original iPad. The app also supports most imageRUNNER and imageRUNNER ADVANCE enterprise multifunction office systems and includes support for the next generation imageRUNNER ADVANCE multifunction devices. In addition, the app supports compatible imageCLASS printers and imageRUNNER LBP printers.

Intuitive Printer Communication

The app can search for and identify Canon printers within a wireless (Wi-Fi) broadcast range – and automatically save these devices for future use. If the Canon printer cannot be found within a wireless broadcast range, users can manually enter the IP address of the Canon device to list it as one of their available print devices.

Opportunity to Choose Print Settings Optimizes Workflow

The app offers a variety of built-in printing options to enhance control and performance. Users can tailor print range, paper size, color output, and number of copies directly from the app. Depending on the finishing features on the printer, documents can also be stapled directly from the menu. Additionally, users can instruct the app to feed paper automatically or via the device manual bypass.

Preview Modes Support Enhances Ease of Use

Users will be able to preview documents, photos and web pages prior to printing to determine the ideal settings for a specific print job. Items with multiple pages can also be previewed by swiping the screen to move through the document.

The Canon Mobile Printing App is available for free from the App Store℠ or atwww.itunes.com/appstore. Search for “Canon Mobile Printing”.